As he pulled out the “Paul C. Bluff” packaging Will said with a certain drollness, “it must be camera stuff because Joe is the only one excited.”  It was.  An AlienBee 800 strobe, so’s ya know.

And since I was already planning on doing pictures with the fam that afternoon, this made for a most welcomed complement.  We had lots of fun, and that was even before the gun.

I did tag this post as a just for photographers because I wanted to touch on some of the technical stuff as well.  Everything from this point down I did with one light, no reflectors, in Mom and Dad’s living room.  The ambient light was a little low, but not dark.  I was shooting between f/9 – f/14 @ 1/250 (ISO 50) with the AB800 around 50%.

As you can see above, I was using a shutter speed of 1/320 (max is around 1/200 – 1/250), and it puts a black bar on the side (this is the shutter curtain encroaching on the exposure, cutting out the light from the strobe).  I played around with it on purpose to give a leaner composition before I totally washed out all ambient light.

Also, you can see that my background was showing.  I was still finding “black” (f I recall, at this point I was around f/7 with a higher ISO, 400 maybe, and lower strobe power).

We didn’t use an umbrella or softbox to modify the light from the strobe for one main reason: the room was too small and the spillover light was lighting the background making it impossible to “black” it out.

Instead, we used a grid spot on our strobe (flat round thing with a honeycomb patter that concentrates the light pattern). It gives it a hard, classic Hollywood feel. I liked that. And a note, for one model we used either a 10 or 20 degree grid, but for two models, it was just too narrow so we had to expand to either a 30 or 40. Any bigger would have started to give us a little too much spill-over.

Also, I’ve sprinkled in some pictures out of order, because this IS also an out-takes post.
All of this lighting is “one-light” where only a key light is used. It tends to have a dramatic, low-key (dark) feel to it. So, not always acceptable, depending on what you’re going for. In this scenario, it really helped me get rid of all the distracting background lines and shapes. Plus, I can get studio looking images without actually having a studio.
After playing with it a bit, I began to get a good idea about the pros and cons of using a strobe as opposed to small flash.

Pros: Faster recycle time (more pictures per second); greater range of power (this can be useful when overpowering the Sun or other harsh conditions); in my opinion the controls are easier to adjust in action–they’re not designed to be on autopilot like small flashes; and lastly, there are more and “better” modifiers for them.  Only recently have some form of softbox been made available for small flashes.  Before that, you either had to make your own (good luck) or get a big strobe if you wanted to use these kinds of light modifiers.

Cons: You need either a battery pack (and these can cost as much as the strobes) or an extension cord/wall outlet.  Not a problem, just need to plan ahead.  They take up more room when you’re transporting / storing them.  Again, not a big thing, just different if you’re coming from small flashes.  Also, they cost more.

Verdict: I primarily work in natural or available light for a few reasons I won’t go into here, but I am looking forward to incorporating these more. I like this much better than small flashes.

Mucho funo.The last challenge was to not have the black, matte finish gun disappear into the black background.  Solution: we simply angled it to capture the specular highlights, and since it was a matte finish, we never had a problem with it reflecting too much light back.

As you can see in the very last image of Care and me playing around, we weren’t really considering this, and the gun almost disappears. That could be a big factor when, like the two images immediacy below, you’re using the gun purposely as a compositional element. 

This shoot took place up and down Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive.  Toward the end of the night we migrated toward the Magazine area.

“That’s absolutely rid–no…that’s, no.  Just, no.  …what were you thinking.” I don’t remember what was happening here, but I think it went like her saying these words.
Really, this is one of my favorites from the whole shoot.  Not an out-take at all.  But it was kind of getting lost in the first post, and it was too good for that.This was us using the natural slither of strong, directional light from the Sun.  It was about a head too short.  If you go back to Tuesday’s post, you can see the headshot that corresponds to this awkward hold it-hold! it pose.Isaac was a street preacher setting up in the neutral ground.  He let us pose with his podium.“Pop” actually ‘found’ us.  We had just finished using a location and were moving on when he chased after us.  Take a picture with me? I instantly agreed, looked back and realized I probably should have asked McKenzie first.  Oops.  But she was totally cool with it, as always.

By the way, Pop left us with strict instructions to post this on Facebook.  Look for it.

So, in effect, this has made me think much quicker and natural about taking pictures.  With all that ‘practice’, I still get a bunch of typical, crazy shots, and hiking last weekend was no exception.

Ooo, Sam, pretend like you’re licking that fuzzy, green stuff. Click.  Great!  Wait, did you actually lick it?? Yes.

Here are a combination of outtakes and behind-the-scene shots from our shoot with Lauren this past weekend.  As you can see–we had lots of fun!

Plus, I climbed a really tall thing.  So that was something.

we found some cool stuff.  old checkbooks. bullet holes. the usual…getting used to the fact that nobodies coming out of here clean.“pensive.” getting there.…didn’t make itwe almost missed this very, narrow alley full of wonderfully soft light.the alley: not my idea.  the ironing board: not my idea.  this.  my idea.  I just take pictures. don’t judge.This was literally reminiscing about what kinds of trouble “Sarah and Lauren” get into when together.Yup.Here is where they kept all the bees.  The big ones.

Those are the first two.

And then I saw a Lamborghini.

354,000.00

in case you were wondering.

The rest is just the randomness from the day; out-takes of Keith that I liked but didn’t make the final cut; lunch; and a truck.

truck:

Quick note on photography-speak, “editing” can refer to two things.   The first is the process of rating all of your images as either keepers, throw-aways, runner-ups, maybes, and so on.  The second is where you actually change details of an individual file–like what I talked about in my November 11th post about taking pictures.  The latter is also sometimes referred to as post-production.

Here are some of the outtakes I mentioned above.  The after and before, the what I was thinking when I took it, and the what I was thinking when I edited it:

I liked the statue, and wanted to make it my subject, although, it alone was kind of boring.  Knowing the Sun was going to set in an hour or so, I walked around it until I found an angle where the Sun could shine through the trees and compositionally offset the statue.  The main edits I did on this were to increase the contrast (making the blacks blacker), added a tiny bit of warm by adjusting the white balance, and finished with the usual sharpening.

Here I was trying to get a shot of the park worker’s legs propped up on his desk inside his castle-hut, while the shadows quickly enveloped the rest of his body.  You can kind of see that in the original image, but the exposure inside the hut was just too dark.  So, I applied Monochrome Mixer (which is a more powerful version of removing all saturation, the normal way you change to black and white), increased the contrast, brought the “light” curve of Levels inward to brighten up the lighter hues only, and sharpened it all up.  Plus straighten & crop, forgot to mention that.

Because the image was slightly out of focus, I went heavier on contrast than I sometimes do to give it a film-feel.

P.S.  The title of this post refers to Photoshop, but I don’t actually use it on my images.  I do all of my editing in Aperture.

What did I learn? Movies are fun to make but a whole lot more work than still photography. Seriously. It’s crazy. I don’t know what they’re thinking.

Without further adieu (or digression), here it is!

Whenever I do a shoot or go on a trip, I inevitably have out-takes–pictures that are funny or noteworthy but otherwise not a part of the top-5 percent that makes the post. Here are a few out-takes that still make me smile.